Article Image

IPFS News Link • Politics

No Liberal: Hillary Is Pro Multinational and Pro Military-Industrial Complex

• http://www.thedailybell.com

That's why I pledge that in my first 100 days as president, we will make the biggest investment in new good-paying jobs since World War II. We need more jobs you can support a family on, especially in places that have been left out and left behind, from Coal Country, to Indian Country, to inner cities, to every place that has been hollowed out when a factory closed or a mine shut down.  –Recent Hillary Speech from TIME magazine

TIME magazine among other publications gives Hillary Clinton a lot of positive coverage. It recently reproduced a full speech of hers which dealt mostly with "unification and community," two favorite themes of hers.

But in this article, we'll show clearly that Hillary is pro-multinational and pro-military-industrial complex. Those are her main planks, even if she rarely talks about them.

The speech as presented by TIME provides us with a vision of Hillary as a peaceful person whose main focus as president will be the greater good of America's poor and middle-classes.

The propaganda surrounding Hillary's political stances is much different than the truth.

In fact an analysis of the "big investment" Hillary plans shows that the investment will be made via taxing trillions in offshore  revenue.

In a June post at the Intercept entitled, "Hillary Clinton Hints at Giant, Trump-Like Giveaway to Corporate America,"  Jon Schwarz analyzes plans for Hillary's big investment and concludes it will be paid for by aggressive tax reductions on multinationals.

[Here speech] was full of Bernie Sanders-like rhetoric about "outrageous behavior" by business and Wall Street.  But it also included a dog whistle that only huge multinational corporations would hear, telling them that she plans to deliver on one of their greatest dreams and slash their longterm taxes by hundreds of billions of dollars.

The heart of this plan will be an "infrastructure bank … that will bring private sector dollars off the sidelines and put them to work here."

But where would the money come from? Schwarz suggests it might come in taxes from trillions the nation's largest corporations have stored overseas.

 Congress granted corporations a tax holiday in 2004 that let them bring back their profits at a tax rate of about 5 percent, or one-seventh of what the normal tax law required. Clinton, then a senator from New York, voted for it.

The incentives haven't changed since then, so profits held overseas by U.S. multinationals have accumulated again and have now reached an incredible $2.4 trillion. That's about 65 percent of the 2015 federal budget and 13 percent of the entire U.S. economy.

The law Hillary is apparently contemplating  would tax corporations whether or not they repatriated funds, but would also radically reduce their taxes.

Clinton has been vague about these plans but, meeting in April with the New York Daily News editorial board she indicated infrastructure money "may be [acquired by] repatriation."

Schwarz also quotes her as saying, she intends to bring "private sector dollars off the sidelines and put them to work here."

That phrase — bringing corporate money "off the sidelines" — is a favorite of both Democratic and Republican elites to describe slashing the tax rate on overseas profits.

Hillary intends to repatriate this revenue by making a deal with transnational corporations that have legally kept their profits offshore.

She wants to change the law to gain access to some of that revenue and then intends to use that revenue to fund infrastructure efforts and other forms of job creation.

The ability to unlock this offshore revenue is one reason why she is confident she will be able to work with Republicans in the House and Senate – as they would like to gain access to those funds as well.

Most importantly, however, the deal will enhance the functionality of transnational corporations. They will be able to operate more normally since they can brings funds back to the US.

There are other ways that Clinton intends to support the nation's largest multinationals.

Despite rhetorical opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, she won't oppose it, per Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's former Secretary of Labor.

He recently revealed a conversation with a Clinton advisor that he placed on his Facebook page.

AzureStandard